STOP THIS THREAD!!!!

mnogpi...@gnfjdur.bjnghd.gntdou.ngreo.ghjhpsperi.hnbdiot.fnjds.com

HOLY SHIT!!!! NO KIDDING!!!

Dont go blabbing how existing technology is impractical for continuing
exponential growth. More technology to make bigger DRAM chips will be
made, probably at an exponential growth equalling that of RAM
advancements.

Whats physically impossible? Take a 1x1x1 (in cm) cube of material.
Lets assume an average radius of an atom of 0.1 nanometres, (or 10^-10
metres). The volume an atom takes up can be approximated by (0.1nm)^3,
which is 10^-30 cub.m. So, in 0.000001 cub.m. (1 cub.cm) there is:
 0.000001
---------- = 10^24 atoms.
 10^-30

But we forget about the space between the atoms, so lets divide by
1000: 10^21 atoms.

Ok?? Big wow! So whats for? My point is that somewhere in the next
couple of centuries humans are going to acheive large scale nanotech
technology. So in a 1cm cube we could see up to 10^21 bits of storage,
or 1,000,000,000 terabits of storage, *1 thousand million terabits*.
But of course you cant change the state of an atom so this is only a
thoretical maximum. But it shows how the space argument is almost
invalid.

Whats the 2nd sentance got to do with the first sentance? And how are
you going to get an app into mem if your not using it? A few years
ago, (say later '80s) 1MB for an app was *big*. So what are we up to
now? MS office fully installed takes up 100MB. Thats 25MB a program.
(word, excel, powerpoint, access). And we dont think of that as "big",
because several other apps are the same.

The fact is that GB's of ram in machines is practically garunteed
because by the time we get to GB's of ram, we'll be in 100's or 1000's
of GBs of disk space. Your average app will take up say at least half
gigabyte of disk space. The thing is hardware grows because of
software pushing it. If software wasnt pushing, we wouldnt go out and
buy new PCs would we? So it all depends on how big can microsoft can
make their software. And *dont* forget about about the new DVD-CD
format with its several GB capacity just around the corner.

Scott Nudds <af...@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca> wrote in article
<5dakrk$...@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca>...

<<<<<SNIP>>>>>

Hmmm...  Didnt somebody once say the same thing about having 640K of
memory?  And hardrives over 40 MB as well...  Just a thought

Jim

Samsung developed a 1 gig chip about 6 months ago.
NEC just developed a 4 gig chip

In article <5dakrk$...@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca>,

Actually, they are coming out with mac clone personel computers that have
the capacity to have 1 gigabyte of RAM.  I'm not sure what company makes
them, but they are out there.

: >   No personal computer will ever have gigabytes of RAM, just as no
: > automobile has giga-gallon gas tanks.

: May I ask why not? - if the trend of my personal computers continus,
: ther's a doubling af memory about each 2.5 years.

  Exponential growth is impossible to sustain for any appreciable
length of time as a practical matter.  The fact that current growth is
exponential means that in short order we can expect it to abruptly halt.
But this is not the reason PC's will never have gigabytes of RAM.

  The reason is simple.  Somewhere in the 50 to 200 megabyte range, all
applications, (or at least their active portion), will reside in memory.
Doubling memory may allow the entire set of applications to reside in
memory, but the performance gain will be small.  The larger the memory
capacity, the smaller the gain.

  As a result, additional RAM memory will not be added.

: Now being 64MB - it
: would take 4*2.5 years = 10 years before I hit the GB and in 15 years
: I'll hit the 32bit address-space limit.

  And how many more years before the count of bits is equivalent to the
number of silicon atoms in earths crust?

  Does exponential growth confuse you?

: Kristian Thommesen, science student at the University of Aarhus.

  How sad.

--
<---->

<snip>

But at the same time, applications are becoming larger and larger. Who
is to say how much memory Word '99 may require, for example?
As an example, voxel data requires huge amounts of memory. To achieve
real-time perdformance for something like viewing voxels, shouldn't
the data also be able to reside in RAM?

-Chris

: But at the same time, applications are becoming larger and larger. Who
: is to say how much memory Word '99 may require, for example?

  It will require virtual memory, not RAM.  Are you going to wait 6 min
for your word processor to load?  I don't think so.

: As an example, voxel data requires huge amounts of memory. To achieve
: real-time perdformance for something like viewing voxels, shouldn't
: the data also be able to reside in RAM?

  Storing a digital video library in RAM for instant access would require
tetrabytes of RAM.  Just because you can invision some lame use for
gigabytes of RAM does not make it practical or even desirable to use
memory in such a way.

  Past a few megabytes, the only thing more RAM gives you is faster random
access to code and data than would otherwise be obtained with virtual
memory.

  As I said earlier, once you get past 50-100 megabytes of RAM, virtual
memory makes more sense.  I expect 200 megabytes will be the limit for
most users.  People who like to fake photographs will probably want
several times this amount.  The rest will be virtual.

In article <5dulqk$...@main.freenet.hamilton.on.ca>,

Scott,

I suggest you archive this thread and pull it out on Feb 12/2002 in 5
years, which is about three doublings away.

Tom